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Nvidia seeks peace with Linux, pledges help on open source driver

278 points by bitops 13y ago

dnautics 13y ago
you don't suppose this came about because steam announced steamOS? edit: noticed it's in the article.
- rkalla 13y ago
  Just came here to make the same observation; I think this move is two-fold: 1. We are doing this anyway because of Steam OS. 2. Might as well get good community karma for it. Win-win for us I suppose, another viable entertainment platform to compete with Google/Amazon/Microsoft/Apple.
- ihsw 13y ago
  Canonical has been courting GPU manufacturers (Amd, Nvidia, Intel) for quite some time, so they can definitely take some credit for Nvidia's recent forthcoming behavior. One has to wonder about Canonical and Intel falling out recently.
- brokenparser 13y ago
  Valve is one company which has been developing a distro internally. nVidia is another company which has been working on polishing up some documents in order to release them on their FTP site. Yesterday, both companies stepped forward and announced what they've been up to lately. Neither of them have noted any relevancy at all to each others developments and (as an outsider) it seems unreasonable to speculate on such based on timing alone. SteamOS is unlikely to ever use nouveau and nVidia is even more unlikely to consider SteamOS as a reason to release documents for nouveau. Many more projects are ongoing all over the world and any two of them could at some point make announcements on the same day.
  - pbhjpbhj 13y ago
    >nVidia is another company which has been working on polishing up some documents in order to release them on their FTP site. // You know this for a fact? It's not that the announcement was made now to gain traction in the Linux community and push forward Nvidia as the graphics company for Linux then? It surprises me a bit. Too be honest I'd have thought Nvidia would need to document their drivers for internal purposes and that the detail already in the internal documentation would be more than sufficient for the Nouveau team to use. But I'm an outsider to GPU engineering and programming in general really so a misapprehension is quite likely. >Many more projects are ongoing all over the world and any two of them could at some point make announcements on the same day. Indeed but you'd expect Nvidia, or similar, to be manoeuvring themselves to align with Steam's announcement.
    - swetland 13y ago
      If this were about PR it wouldn't be a post to a technical mailing list about a single document being dropped and mention of work going on to provide more (but unlikely all) docs in the future. Just because two things happen on the same day (or within a week of each other, etc) doesn't mean they're closely connected. Having worked closely with silicon vendors in the past, the situation that there are no internal docs or that the docs are horribly outdated or incorrect compared to the HDL or source code, is pretty common. When the only consumer of docs is an internal team, it's not uncommon for those docs to be nowhere near what an external team would expect or need (or a company would be willing to release without serious cleanup and checking).
      - pbhjpbhj 13y ago
        >If this were about PR it wouldn't be a post to a technical mailing list // You're probably right. That said your view of PR seems naive. It looks far better to release on social networks that someone found that CompanyN was "already" working on something than it does that there's an official press release. The channel used here - mailing list to social networks - doesn't tell us much IMO. >it's not uncommon for those docs to be nowhere near what an external team would expect or need // You think they'd be worse than the nothing that is currently provided by many hardware manufacturers.
kunai 13y ago
Linus' response: We'll see. I'm cautiously optimistic that this is a real shift in how Nvidia perceives Linux. The actual docs released so far are fairly limited, and in themselves they wouldn't be a big thing, but if Nvidia really does follow up and start opening up more, that would certainly be great.
- cobrausn 13y ago
  Why not include the rest? Or at least, the rest of what was mentioned in the article. They've already been much better in the ARM SoC space than they were on the more traditional GPU side, and I really hope that some day I can just apologize for ever giving them the finger.
  - sz4kerto 13y ago
    BTW, that difference comes from the different amount of proprietary IP in the respective fields.
    - ajross 13y ago
      There really is comparatively little "proprietary IP" on the kernel side of a GPU driver. In almost all cases, the kernel is responsible for doing things like setting modes, managing memory allocation/mapping between the GPU and CPU domains, and transmitting command buffers from userspace to the hardware. Where there is proprietary stuff, it's generally related to stuff like DRM (HDCP) or video playback which aren't covered by the kernel DRM framework anyway and wouldn't prevent an free interoperable driver.
      - Arelius 13y ago
        I mean, glsl compilers and optimizers. And as time goes on, Nvidia is moving more of the fixed function out of silicon into GPU software. Which is effectively binary blobs that need to get uploaded to the GPU. This all seems like quite a bit of "propietary IP"
      - 13y ago
castis 13y ago
As someone who wasn't aware of the issue with Optimus nVidia cards before I purchased my laptop, this is fantastic news. I get support thanks to the wonderful work of the bumblebee team but it's never really felt "solid" to me. However, this is most likely because of my inexperience with the subject. I feel as though I represent a fairly decent number of people when I thank Valve for the steps being taken to make Linux better as I use it as my primary OS.
- xradionut 13y ago
  I've yet to get bumblebee working on my laptop. Same system works fine under Windows. :( If Nvida could fix Optimus for other OSes, there might be more Linux users/gamers.
- potkor 13y ago
  There's supposed to be native Optimus support in the latest drivers. Ubuntu is aiming to support it for 13.10 (and backport to LTS), see https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/HybridGraphics https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/HybridGraphics Let's hope it works out. There are still some showstopper bugs like suspend not working and touchpad locking up. Bumblebee was always a stopgap and a kludge - and a lot of credit is due for the enterprising bumblebee hackers.
  - virtualwhys 13y ago
    I've yet to hear whether or not the new Optimus drivers reduce heat generation for multi-monitor setups (which are fixed to max power mode in Linux when more than 1 monitor is in use, resulting in more fan noise). Would hope so, but never get much a reply from Nvidia's Linux board: https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/board/98/ https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/board/98/ As it stands was forced to modify the VBIOS in order to undervolt the card and finally get the GPU fan in laptop to shut up. Silence is golden.
- hrkristian 13y ago
  Aye, I chose my laptop (ASUS G55VW) mostly for its lack of Optimus (The Intel GPU is dead weight). I'm a Linux nut, but instability like seen with Optimus -despite the amazing efforts of the Bumblebee team- is a no-go for me. Hopefully, this new openness will lead to better general support for Nvidia cards, as it is there are distros (Arch for instance, my favorite) where Nouveau and Nvidia proprietary driver cannot detect my GPU properly.
hansjorg 13y ago
This is a bit surprising. I was expecting an increased effort into their proprietary drivers due to Valve's Linux announcements, but not this. Of course they could do both, but isn't Nouveau 3D performance so far behind the proprietary drivers that nobody is going to be using it for gaming anyway (at least for a long time)? I guess it could be that they're just buying some goodwill from the general community in anticipation of working closer with it.
- TheCraiggers 13y ago
  You're making the assumption that the problems with performance are caused by many small issues. It could very easily be the case that a couple medium-sized changes will drastically improve performance. This is pure conjecture on both our parts, of course. I was simply taking issue with your prediction of Nouveau not being useful for a 'long time'. It almost sounded like you were suggesting this was a useless gesture on Nvidia's part.
  - hansjorg 13y ago
    I don't think it's a useless gesture, just that it seems more like a PR move directed at the community than directly related to SteamOS.
- mayhew 13y ago
  "NVIDIA is releasing public documentation on certain aspects of our GPUs, with the intent to address areas that impact the out-of-the-box usability of NVIDIA GPUs with Nouveau." Seems like they just want Nouveau to work better during normal desktop usage. I doubt they plan to release enough information to make them competitive with their proprietary drivers.
- zanny 13y ago
  > isn't Nouveau 3D performance so far behind the proprietary drivers that nobody is going to be using it for gaming anyway (at least for a long time)? Not really that bad. On Kepler+ cards it sucks, but I threw Nouveau on my old gtx 285 pc back before I realized Nvidia were anti-opensource assholes (tbh, just like Intel is with cpus) and it can run most games at 60 fps at 1080p as long as they are running at medium or so settings. That has to be in context, though, since I was only running minecraft, darkplaces, doomsday, flash games, and humble bundle games like Torchlight and Bastion on it for my mother to play. But you can enable reclocking, and it does run ok, but it is around half as fast as the proprietary driver is in the same games at best.
ianstallings 13y ago
Skeptical panda is very skeptical. If these open source drivers perform as well as their proprietary ones I will eat a whole crow pie.
redthrowaway 13y ago
As far as the timing of this move and the announcement of SteamOS is concerned, I'm having difficulty seeing the reasoning behind it. Wouldn't Nvidia just continue work on their proprietary Linux drivers, and wouldn't most gamers (who are unlikely to care about FOSS) simply use them? I imagine OEMs would include the best drivers available for the devices the choose to use, which at this point means proprietary.
- ajross 13y ago
  Surely SteamOS will be using a proprietary driver build. There are reasons to desire DRM/KMS-based drivers, and Valve might have been pushing this to NVIDIA, but surely "open sourceness" isn't going to be a feature driver for SteamOS. And in any case the NVIDIA proprietary userspace driver stack doesn't work with the Nouveau kernel driver anyway. Maybe this means there is hope that it will someday.
  - Already__Taken 13y ago
    I can imagine that with valve engineers being used to their pretty open source engine development practices. Starting to talk more with Nvidia hardware people they might be asking for a lot more improvements that nvidia could be starting to realise they might benefit from offloading to the open source world. When Microsoft or sony come knocking to have this conversation they might be more prepared to put a specialist hardware team between the system developers and hardware makers coupled with a very strict QA process.
    - shawn-furyan 13y ago
      This is pretty close to my interpretation. Basically I think that Valve has forced the hands of the graphics card makers to elevate the Linux platform to first class citizen status. Due to the poor integration of the Nvidia proprietary drivers with the Linux kernel, it seems like they have two options to get their drivers into a better state: 1. Hire a lot of kernel hackers 2. Try to get the open source driver maintainers to improve integration in a way that is closer to the actual hardware (without giving everything away), and then somehow tie their proprietary driver into that integration code. The letter certainly doesn't express interest in improving the capabilities of the nouveau drivers to a point that they can compete with the proprietary drivers in terms of 3d performance, and I think that it would be prudent of the open source driver maintainers to be skeptical of Nvidia's motives given the timing and limited nature of the release.
Arnor 13y ago
Finally! I have an image of Linus flipping the bird in my image library :)
tomrod 13y ago
Great! Looking forward to seeing this progress.
icambron 13y ago
One thing I guess I don't understand is why Nvidia's own drivers are closed source to begin with. What do they gain by it? Is it that open source drivers would make their hardware easier to reverse engineer? Is it that the drivers themselves are an important piece of IP, and competitors would learn all these cool tricks they use in their drivers? Neither of those fit my model of the role and value of drivers. It seems like they'd just want to maximize the usefulness of the hardware they sell. But I'm obviously missing something. Edit: Thanks for the responses. That's quite a variety answers.
- mh- 13y ago
  more likely: IP encumbrances in code (or specifications) that they've licensed (or licensed access to).
  - cookiecaper 13y ago
    This is the story they always use when asked. They claim that the board contains proprietary components licensed from third parties, and that it would violate their licensing agreement if the code pertaining to those components was released. This is a very convenient PR move because it shifts all the blame onto groups of unnamed entities, and tends to place the burden on the open-source advocate to get all of these unnamed entities to modify their licensing agreements.
    - rosser 13y ago
      And that makes it untrue ... how, again?
      - joosters 13y ago
        No-one said it was outright untrue, but neither has any company ever detailed which 3rd parties are responsible, so there's no way of finding out just how big a problem it really is.
      - takluyver 13y ago
cobrausn 13y ago
Here is the full text of the email, also sent to the Mesa3D development community. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Andy Ritger <aritger@nvidia.com> Date: Mon, Sep 23, 2013 at 11:44 PM Subject: [Nouveau] offer to help, DCB To: nouveau@lists.freedesktop.org Hi Nouveau developers, NVIDIA is releasing public documentation on certain aspects of our GPUs, with the intent to address areas that impact the out-of-the-box usability of NVIDIA GPUs with Nouveau. We intend to provide more documentation over time, and guidance in additional areas as we are able. As a first step towards that, we've posted a document here: ftp://download.nvidia.com/open-gpu-doc/DCB/1/DCB-4.0-Specification.html that documents the Device Control Block ("DCB") layout in the VBIOS. The DCB describes board topology and the board's display connectors. I suspect much of the information in that document is not news for the Nouveau community, but hopefully it will be helpful to confirm your understanding or flesh out the implementation of a few unhandled cases. A few of us who work on NVIDIA's proprietary Linux GPU driver will pay attention to nouveau@lists.freedesktop.org and try to chime in when we can. If there are specific areas of documentation that would most help you, that feedback would help NVIDIA prioritize our documentation efforts. If you have specific questions for NVIDIA, you can ask here, or direct them to: open-gpu-doc@nvidia.com. I can't promise we'll be able to answer everything, but we'll provide best-effort in areas where we are able. Thanks, - Andy Ritger
comex 13y ago
Direct link to thread on lists.freedesktop.org: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/nouveau/2013-September/014480.html http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/nouveau/2013-September...
verbin217 13y ago
Here's the relevant part of the video that the picture is from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MShbP3OpASA&t=2980 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MShbP3OpASA&t=2980
gcb0 13y ago
This happens every two years. Nvidia: we will help the open source community! > delivers binary blob nvidia: we will help the open source community with a better integrated driver > delivers deb and rpm that inject binary blob in kernel ... what they are launching today is information that Noveau would get anyway after a couple weeks with the new cards. All this will do is get you the same crappy support you would get, two weeks in advance.
mahgnous 13y ago
My guess is this has something to do with SteamOS and the recent rise in gaming on Linux.
kazagistar 13y ago
My akmods in fedora broke a few days ago, and thus I am still on the 3.10 kernel.
lukaszdk 13y ago
There was a thread on Reddit a while back were a few users said that Nvidia are not that great at documenting their hardware internally. "Nope. One of the reasons is that NVIDIA still doesn't document anything. A friend of mine worked there, and he told me that most of the knowledge was gathered by having little gatherings with the "village elders" as they were called. Seriously. He even leaked a humorous internal video to me called "Zero Documentation" in the style of Zero Punctuation." http://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1anev9/a_nice_little_writeup_on_why_xbox_emulation_is/c8z24z1 http://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1anev9/a_nice_little_...
cientifico 13y ago
Still rejecting to buy nothing with nvidia for my personal use.
TerraHertz 13y ago
IMO there's one primary reason Nvidia does not release open source drivers, and never will, despite whatever they say now. It has nothing to do with lawyers, or protecting hardware secrets - that's all just smokescreen to obscure the real reason. If open source drivers were available, it would be possible to port the low level code to any operating system environment anyone wanted to. And that means future, experimental operating systems and GUIs too. Effectively this would enable OS/GUI innovation, allowing radical new 3D graphics based UIs, escaping the Microsoft Windows, Linux and Apple trap. Considering the dismal state of UIs now (Windows 8, cough, say no more) you can imagine what the appearance of a well designed, sensible and user-enabling OS/GUI in the next few years would do to Microsoft. Open source 3D drivers would definitely result in a quite rapid overturn of the present OS monopoly-by-three applecart. So the powers that be in the personal computer market are going to allow it ... over their dead bodies. Incidentally, 3Dfx did make the full source code for their Glide drivers available (for money.) I worked at a company that bought the 3Dfx drivers, and I personally ported the drivers (which were Windows & Linux targeted) to a minimal MIPS processor based platform intended for gambling machines. It worked - passed all the test code. Then the company went through a 'local CEO was ripping off the company, sack him and kill all his projects' spasm, and the machine never got to market. Soon after that 3Dfx was deep sixed and their patents sucked into the Nvidia pool. Personally I've always suspected those events may have had something to do with certain parties making sure an open source 3D engine never happened - precisely because it would be a threat to the OS status quo.

278 points by bitops 13y ago

dnautics 13y ago

you don't suppose this came about because steam announced steamOS? edit: noticed it's in the article.

rkalla 13y ago
Just came here to make the same observation; I think this move is two-fold: 1. We are doing this anyway because of Steam OS. 2. Might as well get good community karma for it. Win-win for us I suppose, another viable entertainment platform to compete with Google/Amazon/Microsoft/Apple.
ihsw 13y ago
Canonical has been courting GPU manufacturers (Amd, Nvidia, Intel) for quite some time, so they can definitely take some credit for Nvidia's recent forthcoming behavior. One has to wonder about Canonical and Intel falling out recently.
brokenparser 13y ago
Valve is one company which has been developing a distro internally. nVidia is another company which has been working on polishing up some documents in order to release them on their FTP site. Yesterday, both companies stepped forward and announced what they've been up to lately. Neither of them have noted any relevancy at all to each others developments and (as an outsider) it seems unreasonable to speculate on such based on timing alone. SteamOS is unlikely to ever use nouveau and nVidia is even more unlikely to consider SteamOS as a reason to release documents for nouveau. Many more projects are ongoing all over the world and any two of them could at some point make announcements on the same day.
- pbhjpbhj 13y ago
  >nVidia is another company which has been working on polishing up some documents in order to release them on their FTP site. // You know this for a fact? It's not that the announcement was made now to gain traction in the Linux community and push forward Nvidia as the graphics company for Linux then? It surprises me a bit. Too be honest I'd have thought Nvidia would need to document their drivers for internal purposes and that the detail already in the internal documentation would be more than sufficient for the Nouveau team to use. But I'm an outsider to GPU engineering and programming in general really so a misapprehension is quite likely. >Many more projects are ongoing all over the world and any two of them could at some point make announcements on the same day. Indeed but you'd expect Nvidia, or similar, to be manoeuvring themselves to align with Steam's announcement.
  - swetland 13y ago
    If this were about PR it wouldn't be a post to a technical mailing list about a single document being dropped and mention of work going on to provide more (but unlikely all) docs in the future. Just because two things happen on the same day (or within a week of each other, etc) doesn't mean they're closely connected. Having worked closely with silicon vendors in the past, the situation that there are no internal docs or that the docs are horribly outdated or incorrect compared to the HDL or source code, is pretty common. When the only consumer of docs is an internal team, it's not uncommon for those docs to be nowhere near what an external team would expect or need (or a company would be willing to release without serious cleanup and checking).
    - pbhjpbhj 13y ago
      >If this were about PR it wouldn't be a post to a technical mailing list // You're probably right. That said your view of PR seems naive. It looks far better to release on social networks that someone found that CompanyN was "already" working on something than it does that there's an official press release. The channel used here - mailing list to social networks - doesn't tell us much IMO. >it's not uncommon for those docs to be nowhere near what an external team would expect or need // You think they'd be worse than the nothing that is currently provided by many hardware manufacturers.

kunai 13y ago

Linus' response: We'll see. I'm cautiously optimistic that this is a real shift in how Nvidia perceives Linux. The actual docs released so far are fairly limited, and in themselves they wouldn't be a big thing, but if Nvidia really does follow up and start opening up more, that would certainly be great.

cobrausn 13y ago
Why not include the rest? Or at least, the rest of what was mentioned in the article. They've already been much better in the ARM SoC space than they were on the more traditional GPU side, and I really hope that some day I can just apologize for ever giving them the finger.
- sz4kerto 13y ago
  BTW, that difference comes from the different amount of proprietary IP in the respective fields.
  - ajross 13y ago
    There really is comparatively little "proprietary IP" on the kernel side of a GPU driver. In almost all cases, the kernel is responsible for doing things like setting modes, managing memory allocation/mapping between the GPU and CPU domains, and transmitting command buffers from userspace to the hardware. Where there is proprietary stuff, it's generally related to stuff like DRM (HDCP) or video playback which aren't covered by the kernel DRM framework anyway and wouldn't prevent an free interoperable driver.
    - Arelius 13y ago
      I mean, glsl compilers and optimizers. And as time goes on, Nvidia is moving more of the fixed function out of silicon into GPU software. Which is effectively binary blobs that need to get uploaded to the GPU. This all seems like quite a bit of "propietary IP"
    - 13y ago

castis 13y ago

As someone who wasn't aware of the issue with Optimus nVidia cards before I purchased my laptop, this is fantastic news. I get support thanks to the wonderful work of the bumblebee team but it's never really felt "solid" to me. However, this is most likely because of my inexperience with the subject. I feel as though I represent a fairly decent number of people when I thank Valve for the steps being taken to make Linux better as I use it as my primary OS.

xradionut 13y ago
I've yet to get bumblebee working on my laptop. Same system works fine under Windows. :( If Nvida could fix Optimus for other OSes, there might be more Linux users/gamers.
potkor 13y ago
There's supposed to be native Optimus support in the latest drivers. Ubuntu is aiming to support it for 13.10 (and backport to LTS), see https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/HybridGraphics https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/HybridGraphics Let's hope it works out. There are still some showstopper bugs like suspend not working and touchpad locking up. Bumblebee was always a stopgap and a kludge - and a lot of credit is due for the enterprising bumblebee hackers.
- virtualwhys 13y ago
  I've yet to hear whether or not the new Optimus drivers reduce heat generation for multi-monitor setups (which are fixed to max power mode in Linux when more than 1 monitor is in use, resulting in more fan noise). Would hope so, but never get much a reply from Nvidia's Linux board: https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/board/98/ https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/board/98/ As it stands was forced to modify the VBIOS in order to undervolt the card and finally get the GPU fan in laptop to shut up. Silence is golden.
hrkristian 13y ago
Aye, I chose my laptop (ASUS G55VW) mostly for its lack of Optimus (The Intel GPU is dead weight). I'm a Linux nut, but instability like seen with Optimus -despite the amazing efforts of the Bumblebee team- is a no-go for me. Hopefully, this new openness will lead to better general support for Nvidia cards, as it is there are distros (Arch for instance, my favorite) where Nouveau and Nvidia proprietary driver cannot detect my GPU properly.

hansjorg 13y ago

This is a bit surprising. I was expecting an increased effort into their proprietary drivers due to Valve's Linux announcements, but not this. Of course they could do both, but isn't Nouveau 3D performance so far behind the proprietary drivers that nobody is going to be using it for gaming anyway (at least for a long time)? I guess it could be that they're just buying some goodwill from the general community in anticipation of working closer with it.

TheCraiggers 13y ago
You're making the assumption that the problems with performance are caused by many small issues. It could very easily be the case that a couple medium-sized changes will drastically improve performance. This is pure conjecture on both our parts, of course. I was simply taking issue with your prediction of Nouveau not being useful for a 'long time'. It almost sounded like you were suggesting this was a useless gesture on Nvidia's part.
- hansjorg 13y ago
  I don't think it's a useless gesture, just that it seems more like a PR move directed at the community than directly related to SteamOS.
mayhew 13y ago
"NVIDIA is releasing public documentation on certain aspects of our GPUs, with the intent to address areas that impact the out-of-the-box usability of NVIDIA GPUs with Nouveau." Seems like they just want Nouveau to work better during normal desktop usage. I doubt they plan to release enough information to make them competitive with their proprietary drivers.
zanny 13y ago
> isn't Nouveau 3D performance so far behind the proprietary drivers that nobody is going to be using it for gaming anyway (at least for a long time)? Not really that bad. On Kepler+ cards it sucks, but I threw Nouveau on my old gtx 285 pc back before I realized Nvidia were anti-opensource assholes (tbh, just like Intel is with cpus) and it can run most games at 60 fps at 1080p as long as they are running at medium or so settings. That has to be in context, though, since I was only running minecraft, darkplaces, doomsday, flash games, and humble bundle games like Torchlight and Bastion on it for my mother to play. But you can enable reclocking, and it does run ok, but it is around half as fast as the proprietary driver is in the same games at best.

ianstallings 13y ago

Skeptical panda is very skeptical. If these open source drivers perform as well as their proprietary ones I will eat a whole crow pie.

redthrowaway 13y ago

As far as the timing of this move and the announcement of SteamOS is concerned, I'm having difficulty seeing the reasoning behind it. Wouldn't Nvidia just continue work on their proprietary Linux drivers, and wouldn't most gamers (who are unlikely to care about FOSS) simply use them? I imagine OEMs would include the best drivers available for the devices the choose to use, which at this point means proprietary.

ajross 13y ago
Surely SteamOS will be using a proprietary driver build. There are reasons to desire DRM/KMS-based drivers, and Valve might have been pushing this to NVIDIA, but surely "open sourceness" isn't going to be a feature driver for SteamOS. And in any case the NVIDIA proprietary userspace driver stack doesn't work with the Nouveau kernel driver anyway. Maybe this means there is hope that it will someday.
- Already__Taken 13y ago
  I can imagine that with valve engineers being used to their pretty open source engine development practices. Starting to talk more with Nvidia hardware people they might be asking for a lot more improvements that nvidia could be starting to realise they might benefit from offloading to the open source world. When Microsoft or sony come knocking to have this conversation they might be more prepared to put a specialist hardware team between the system developers and hardware makers coupled with a very strict QA process.
  - shawn-furyan 13y ago
    This is pretty close to my interpretation. Basically I think that Valve has forced the hands of the graphics card makers to elevate the Linux platform to first class citizen status. Due to the poor integration of the Nvidia proprietary drivers with the Linux kernel, it seems like they have two options to get their drivers into a better state: 1. Hire a lot of kernel hackers 2. Try to get the open source driver maintainers to improve integration in a way that is closer to the actual hardware (without giving everything away), and then somehow tie their proprietary driver into that integration code. The letter certainly doesn't express interest in improving the capabilities of the nouveau drivers to a point that they can compete with the proprietary drivers in terms of 3d performance, and I think that it would be prudent of the open source driver maintainers to be skeptical of Nvidia's motives given the timing and limited nature of the release.

Arnor 13y ago

Finally! I have an image of Linus flipping the bird in my image library :)

tomrod 13y ago

Great! Looking forward to seeing this progress.

icambron 13y ago

One thing I guess I don't understand is why Nvidia's own drivers are closed source to begin with. What do they gain by it? Is it that open source drivers would make their hardware easier to reverse engineer? Is it that the drivers themselves are an important piece of IP, and competitors would learn all these cool tricks they use in their drivers? Neither of those fit my model of the role and value of drivers. It seems like they'd just want to maximize the usefulness of the hardware they sell. But I'm obviously missing something. Edit: Thanks for the responses. That's quite a variety answers.

mh- 13y ago
more likely: IP encumbrances in code (or specifications) that they've licensed (or licensed access to).
- cookiecaper 13y ago
  This is the story they always use when asked. They claim that the board contains proprietary components licensed from third parties, and that it would violate their licensing agreement if the code pertaining to those components was released. This is a very convenient PR move because it shifts all the blame onto groups of unnamed entities, and tends to place the burden on the open-source advocate to get all of these unnamed entities to modify their licensing agreements.
  - rosser 13y ago
    And that makes it untrue ... how, again?
    - joosters 13y ago
      No-one said it was outright untrue, but neither has any company ever detailed which 3rd parties are responsible, so there's no way of finding out just how big a problem it really is.
    - takluyver 13y ago

cobrausn 13y ago

Here is the full text of the email, also sent to the Mesa3D development community. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Andy Ritger <aritger@nvidia.com> Date: Mon, Sep 23, 2013 at 11:44 PM Subject: [Nouveau] offer to help, DCB To: nouveau@lists.freedesktop.org Hi Nouveau developers, NVIDIA is releasing public documentation on certain aspects of our GPUs, with the intent to address areas that impact the out-of-the-box usability of NVIDIA GPUs with Nouveau. We intend to provide more documentation over time, and guidance in additional areas as we are able. As a first step towards that, we've posted a document here: ftp://download.nvidia.com/open-gpu-doc/DCB/1/DCB-4.0-Specification.html that documents the Device Control Block ("DCB") layout in the VBIOS. The DCB describes board topology and the board's display connectors. I suspect much of the information in that document is not news for the Nouveau community, but hopefully it will be helpful to confirm your understanding or flesh out the implementation of a few unhandled cases. A few of us who work on NVIDIA's proprietary Linux GPU driver will pay attention to nouveau@lists.freedesktop.org and try to chime in when we can. If there are specific areas of documentation that would most help you, that feedback would help NVIDIA prioritize our documentation efforts. If you have specific questions for NVIDIA, you can ask here, or direct them to: open-gpu-doc@nvidia.com. I can't promise we'll be able to answer everything, but we'll provide best-effort in areas where we are able. Thanks, - Andy Ritger

comex 13y ago

Direct link to thread on lists.freedesktop.org: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/nouveau/2013-September/014480.html http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/nouveau/2013-September...

verbin217 13y ago

Here's the relevant part of the video that the picture is from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MShbP3OpASA&t=2980 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MShbP3OpASA&t=2980

gcb0 13y ago

This happens every two years. Nvidia: we will help the open source community! > delivers binary blob nvidia: we will help the open source community with a better integrated driver > delivers deb and rpm that inject binary blob in kernel ... what they are launching today is information that Noveau would get anyway after a couple weeks with the new cards. All this will do is get you the same crappy support you would get, two weeks in advance.

mahgnous 13y ago

My guess is this has something to do with SteamOS and the recent rise in gaming on Linux.

kazagistar 13y ago

My akmods in fedora broke a few days ago, and thus I am still on the 3.10 kernel.

lukaszdk 13y ago

There was a thread on Reddit a while back were a few users said that Nvidia are not that great at documenting their hardware internally. "Nope. One of the reasons is that NVIDIA still doesn't document anything. A friend of mine worked there, and he told me that most of the knowledge was gathered by having little gatherings with the "village elders" as they were called. Seriously. He even leaked a humorous internal video to me called "Zero Documentation" in the style of Zero Punctuation." http://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1anev9/a_nice_little_writeup_on_why_xbox_emulation_is/c8z24z1 http://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1anev9/a_nice_little_...

cientifico 13y ago

Still rejecting to buy nothing with nvidia for my personal use.

TerraHertz 13y ago

IMO there's one primary reason Nvidia does not release open source drivers, and never will, despite whatever they say now. It has nothing to do with lawyers, or protecting hardware secrets - that's all just smokescreen to obscure the real reason. If open source drivers were available, it would be possible to port the low level code to any operating system environment anyone wanted to. And that means future, experimental operating systems and GUIs too. Effectively this would enable OS/GUI innovation, allowing radical new 3D graphics based UIs, escaping the Microsoft Windows, Linux and Apple trap. Considering the dismal state of UIs now (Windows 8, cough, say no more) you can imagine what the appearance of a well designed, sensible and user-enabling OS/GUI in the next few years would do to Microsoft. Open source 3D drivers would definitely result in a quite rapid overturn of the present OS monopoly-by-three applecart. So the powers that be in the personal computer market are going to allow it ... over their dead bodies. Incidentally, 3Dfx did make the full source code for their Glide drivers available (for money.) I worked at a company that bought the 3Dfx drivers, and I personally ported the drivers (which were Windows & Linux targeted) to a minimal MIPS processor based platform intended for gambling machines. It worked - passed all the test code. Then the company went through a 'local CEO was ripping off the company, sack him and kill all his projects' spasm, and the machine never got to market. Soon after that 3Dfx was deep sixed and their patents sucked into the Nvidia pool. Personally I've always suspected those events may have had something to do with certain parties making sure an open source 3D engine never happened - precisely because it would be a threat to the OS status quo.